


Dress the Part

by slipstream



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Bondage, Costume Kink, Crossdressing, Identity Porn, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:19:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rorschach and Daniel role-play their way through an impasse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dress the Part

The trophy case is a sore point between them.

Rorschach has never been particularly fond of sentimental keepsakes or self-congratulatory boasting, and it isn’t like the scum they wade through every night deserve any sort of memorializing, even in defeat. But in the grand scheme of things he can see that it’s certainly a minor complaint, so he actually tries to keep his chiding and back-handed insults about it to a relative minimum. Even manages to pull a few self-deprecating grins out of Daniel with an occasional joke at its ridiculous expense.

Until a glossy 8x10 in a gilded frame turns up one night on the topmost shelf.

“What’s this?” he growls, low and dangerous, even though he can tell exactly what it is. The photograph is professionally cropped and developed, the writing in the upper right-hand corner large enough to read from several paces, but he’d recognize the smirking woman posed hand-on-hip, riding crop draped casually over her knee even without the context of the silk-draped bedroom behind her and the defiant cursive of her signature.

Daniel—back to him and half into costume—pauses but doesn’t look up. Rorschach waits—fists shoved deep into trench pockets and a hot numbness spreading from his clenched fingers and up his arms to bloom violently beneath the latex of his face—as Daniel buckles and zips his suit’s armored underlayer and casually adjusts the pull of tights and shorts over his cup before turning to face him.

He must have been expecting this, because he doesn’t ask Rorschach to clarify which trinket has earned his ire, just meets his rumbled challenge with a defiant stare.

“Figured you’d prefer it there instead of up by the calendar in the kitchen. Unless there’s someplace else you’d rather stick it.”

The baseness of the cheap insult only sets him further on edge. “Shouldn’t be here at all. How did—?”

“Her lawyer forwarded it along, actually.” He picks up the thick spandex top and pulls it on, the grey fabric sliding over his armor and muscles as gracefully as always. Rorschach refuses to be distracted. “Got it through my usual channels. Nice guy, practical. Thanked us for running the bust the way we did, said a lot of Leslie’s girls are getting help now through the state.”

“’ _Leslie_ ’.”

“Leslie Chadwicke. It’s on her booking papers and everything.”

Two weeks ago, a lifetime in New York, but how many months before that final bust had she skirted just outside of their grasp?

“Making mockery of you, mockery of justice. Leading you around like a dog on a leash.” He wants to spit, swallows the bile down instead. “ _Degrading_.”

“I’ll decide that for myself, thank you.” Daniel doesn’t even have the courtesy to sound affronted. He turns back to the workbench where the last remnants of his costume—belt, gloves, cape, cowl, goggles—are laid out and waiting.

“Hnnh. Question the rationale behind your decisions.”

A muffled snort of laughter that even the swirl of cape across shoulders can’t mask, and there’s derision there but Rorschach can’t tell at whom it’s directed. “Yeah, well welcome to the club.”

One final tug at his goggles, snapping them pointedly in place, and now it is Nite Owl looking back at him over his shoulder. Rorschach’s quarrel isn’t with him, so with a snarl he reluctantly lets the matter drop.

*

He doesn’t _forget_ , of course, but something as soft and shameful as professional or personal jealousy ranks low on Rorschach’s priorities.

New York is aflame with gang war, once-respected borders writhing with soldiers. He and Nite Owl are too tired most nights to do more than fall out of their clothes and boneless into bed.

For a few days Rorschach manages to drag himself down the access tunnel and back to his roach-hole of an apartment, but eventually he’s forced to concede the front, settling instead for shaking himself awake and out from under the too-familiar warmth of Daniels’ comforter before the sun is high enough in the window to rouse the other man from sleep.

It frustrates Walter, picking out mistakes in his sewing with aching, blurry eyes, but Rorschach is nothing if not a man of principles, and this quiet distance between the two of them is pointed.

Daniel knows that sometimes the routine of it, the unspoken but unavoidable truths like the changes of Walter’s street clothes folded neatly into the dresser or how they’d silently agreed even on that first night whose side of the bed was whose (Rorschach by the window, Daniel by the door), is too much for him, that it twists his stomach and makes him burn with restless, helpless anger. This was the case even when their intimacy extended no further than a hot, sugary cup of coffee in the yellow light of his kitchen. So he doesn’t say anything, though his eyes before they disappear each night behind Nite Owl’s goggles grow increasingly pensive.

Then, finally, after a week of endless alleyway battles and bedroom trench warfare, there comes a night when the streets, while far from peaceful, are noticeably less bloody. Then another, and another, and while hotspots still flare and rage the war appears to be turning in their favor.

Standing together again under an overcast, faintly glowing sky—two watchers, wrapped in the muffling blanket of their first truly quiet patrol—they negotiate a truce.

Nite Owl turns Archimedes upwards, into the cloud cover, instead of home to the Owl’s Nest. Rorschach tenses as soon as he registers the change of course, insides churning and heavy from something other than the rapid rise in altitude.

Archie hums slightly while in hover mode, a quiet chorus of thrusters and whirring gyroscopes working in harmony with the air currents to keep the whole ship stable. Sometimes Daniel plays music over the onboard 8-track player, but Rorschach far prefers this unhurried, mutedly mechanical soundtrack.

Post-patrol Daniel’s skin smells like sweat and Kevlar and the grit that comes with hard, just labor. Rorschach slips his naked palms beneath Nite Owl’s layers, reverently tracing the red lines where armor creased soft flesh.

“God,” Daniel says, puff of breath warm and intimate against the hollow of Rorschach’s neck even as his hands ghost—hesitant, asking—down his hips. “I’ve missed you.”

(In its own way, this is also routine.)

“Tell me if this isn’t—”

He can’t answer with words, so Rorschach guides Daniel’s hands to the crumpled pile of his discarded trousers, fingers clenched tightly around his wrists so he can feel the faint flutter and pull of muscle and tendon as Daniel works to unhook the brown suspenders.

(The fastenings of his sock garters don’t come free so easily; eventually his partner gives up on the left foot altogether.)

The metal floor is cold against his back. Rorschach knows what’s coming, can almost taste it. He drinks in as much of Daniel with his hands as he can while he still has them free: blunt nails scratching erratic patterns across his broad back before ghosting down to trace the sweet join between ass and thick thighs.

Daniel groans but catches him by the wrists before his probing fingers can sweep further into the damp heat between his legs. “Later,” he promises, planting a quick kiss to his temple, but Rorschach barely hears him over his own ragged, hitching pants and the rush of blood in his ears as Daniel pulls his arms over his head and binds them tightly to the steering column.

The suspenders are elastic enough to give him room to twist and writhe even while the leather digs reassuringly tight into his wrists, a mirror of the grip his sock garter has around his calf. He focuses on the feeling, imagines it winding down his arms and over his whole body, a protective, temporary shield until Daniels’ limbs can properly embrace him. Rorschach has entered an uneasy amnesty with his own nudity, but that nakedness is nothing compared to the flare of conflicted arousal that always comes with the sensation of Daniel’s firm thumbs slipping beneath the edges of his mask, tugging it up and over and sometimes—only here, away from the burden of his day clothes and Walter’s filthy, earthbound history—completely off.

He’s still Rorschach, face or no face, but no matter how many times they do this he still can’t quite suppress the groan of not-quite-pain, not-quite-pleasure that comes with the feeling of latex separating from sweaty skin. Daniel presses a large hand to his face, keeps it there like he’s holding gauze to a wound, and that helps a little.

“Okay?” he asks. Rorschach takes a few measured breaths before nodding—all systems go—and opens his mouth for the gag he knows is waiting, out of sight like so much of the equipment Nite Owl keeps here, ready to be conjured like a rabbit from a silk hat.

He hates the taste of it—red rubber round and cheap and obscene against his tongue, so unlike the cultured purity of purpose of his mask when he sucks the layered latex between his teeth—but the ball gag grants its own strange freedom, muffling the things he needs to say but isn’t quite ready for Daniel to hear.

The blindfold should come next, but Daniel is taking his time, reaching across his body to rummage through one of Archie’s low storage panels. Rorschach closes his eyes, pretends that the cool, comforting slickness of the black silk is already pressed across his lids. He tugs idly at the knotted suspenders while he waits, stretching his body in a way he knows makes the muscles pull tight across his frame.

This has its intended effect; the hand combing back through his sweaty hair twitches and changes course, curled fingers tracing down the line of his neck and collar bone to twist playfully at a taut nipple. But before Rorschach can really settle into the sensation it retreats, leaving him arching his back up for more, and this must have been what Daniel was waiting for because with a rustle of fabric something wide is slipped around his torso and quickly zipped into place.

Rorschach rarely startles, but this anomaly is almost enough to pull him entirely out of this whole perverse pretense. He blinks, cranes his neck to peer down at the black corset now encircling his waist. It’s a cheap, costumey thing, not like any of the vile garments he’s had to sew at work. There’s lacing up the front but that’s just for show—he can feel the cold line of a metal zipper along his side—and there’s no real boning to speak of, just stiff seams meant to give the impression of structure.

He doesn’t grunt, lets his expression carry all his protest. Daniel answers with a maverick grin before bending impossibly double to lick at the line where satin gives way to taut, freckled flesh. His tongue is hot and persuasive enough that Rorschach decides to let this play out a little longer, especially if it means that Daniel is going to shuffle lower down his leg, his own mostly-ignored erection caught between his belly and the quivering muscles of Rorschach’s thigh, and drag the bite-swollen curve of his lips down, down, until—

This is why Rorschach wears the gag. Whatever secrets that wet, sucking heat draws out of him, whatever vulnerabilities are exposed as a clever dart of tongue dips under the edge of his foreskin, they reverberate in the cabin air only as fevered nonsense.

Daniel hums back his own muffled secrets, and the echoing vibrations down his cock and up his spine and blooming bright behind his eyes are so distracting that Rorschach completely misses the black bag, bulky with its concealed contents, that Daniel slides out of the shadows, doesn’t see him reach in to pull out something sinuous and gauzy until the hand pinning his hip to the steel floor slides down to catch the foot of his traitorously bent leg and slip the bunched-up fabric over his pleasure-pointed toes.

Tight pressure moving down his cock, mirroring the lighter constriction moving up his leg. What—

The sound when Daniel pulls back and off IS obscene, his expression grimly pleased. Rorschach growls and tries to buck off his straddling weight, but his partner rides him easily. He has the advantage of leverage in this position, enough so that when Rorschach tries to pull his now-stocking-clad leg out of his grip he just follows him, lets him piston and kick until a pause in his struggles opens up enough for him to slip on the crown jewel of the whole perverse Cinderella farce: a black, patent leather stiletto.

Rorschach growls, wonders when it was that Daniel went certifiably insane, and how he could have missed it.

(He doesn’t let himself wonder why none of this is making his cock throb any less.)

Daniel will have to shift his weight off of Rorschach’s left leg and waste time with the garter if he wants to defile it similarly, will be vulnerable to attack during the transition. Rorschach tenses, waiting for his chance, but Daniel seems to have spotted the flaw in his scheme and with a resigned shrug leaves his left sock be. Rorschach is both incensed and relieved; the familiar warmth and weight of wool held up by elastic and leather is comforting, grounding compared to the alien, airy slickness of silk from thigh to toe.

“How’re your wrists? Not too tight?”

Rorschach manages to knee him soundly in the chest. It isn’t the bondage that has him cranky. Daniel takes the blow as the pointed admonishment it was intended, but despite the lightness of his tone something about the worried quirk of his eyebrows and the nervous dart of his tongue across his lips seems to be apologizing for something yet to come.

He reaches into the bag, comes back with a fistful of crumpled black fabric.

The blindfold. Finally. Rorschach can endure this perversion of his partner’s with it, can twist it into his own inner narrative, find in it a meaning that brings his own release. He closes his eyes in anticipation, opening them again only after the elastic is firmly secured.

Only—

He can still see. Daniel is looking down at him, his face flushed but features steeled into the reserved look Nite Owl sometimes gets just before they leap into battle. Rorschach blinks through the eyelets of the mask, rolls his head to rub the edges of it against his arms, get a feel for its overall shape. Long, flared at the base, but narrowing down to a point. A cat’s-eye.

Everything clicks horribly into place.

He and Daniel have fought before, with words, with fists. He has even hated him at times, hated his soft sensibilities, his unwavering optimism, how tightly he’s managed to tangle himself in Rorschach’s life. Still, this murderous rage that bubbles up within him is like nothing he’s ever felt towards his partner, something raw and painful like an old wound torn open, bleeding citrus and ash.

Who was he fooling, why should Daniel ever want—

When he could—

He pulls at his bonds with none of the play from earlier, muscles rippling with effort and fury. The elastic in his suspenders gives but does not break. He pulls again. Daniel’s knot holds firm, but no matter, he can feel the material threatening to tear. One more pull, maybe two, and then he is going to kill Daniel.

Rorschach snarls around the gag and glares daggers at the man straddling him. Fair notice to prepare himself for his last moments, in deference to their many years of partnership. But Daniel doesn’t heed his warning, ignoring him in favor of picking up his face, turning it over thoughtfully.

Violation on top of humiliation, and he will not _stand_ \--

Daniel isn’t smiling as he watches Rorschach struggle, but there’s something in the set of his jaw and squint of his eyes that Rorschach reads as grim but doubtful amusement.

He meets his stare, eyes clear and deep and dangerous in the streaming moonlight, flashes that crooked, dopey grin of his that never fails to make something deep in Rorschach throb.

Hnnh. As if that will save him.

“Give me the signal if this gets too weird for you,” he says.

It’s just odd enough a statement that Rorschach hesitates, arms still braced for one last pull, and then he forgets about pulling entirely because _Daniel has his face in both hands_ and _he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t dare_ but _he is, no, no!_

Rorschach is intimately familiar with the sound latex makes as it slides over hair and skin, but he’s never heard it at a distance. The moment of disconnect is enough that all of the anger slides out of him in an exhale of despair.

“Hurm,” says Daniel. The latex pulls tightly over his nose and tufts of his hair stick out of the bottom but the black shapes of his face spread and collapse in dumb oblivion to the imposter giving them life.

Gibbous moon on cloudy night. Twin owls in flight, wings spread to catch the last of the last of the evening thermals. Rorschach looks up and back down on himself and up again, echoing out mirror on mirror image, and who is Rorschach and who is the painted whoreson shivering with fear and rage and unwelcome, unbearable lust?

“Jeez, man, how do you breathe in this thing?” Daniel tugs the mask up to settle just over his nose, higher than Rorschach would ever wear it. It’s more of a relief to see his mouth and chin again than he’s really comfortable considering.

“Ahnul.” He jerks his chin upward, ignores the ridiculous shapes of his words around the rubber ball. “Ake ih auh.”

Daniel cocks his head, blots swirling thoughtfully. “No. Not yet.”

“Eh _aag_.” Rorschach bares his lips in clarification.

“Trouble breathing?”

He could lie, but he doesn’t. He shakes his head.

Thumb on his lips, circling round and round before tracing the gag’s leather strap across his cheek and behind his ear. “Let’s leave it on for now.”

Rorschach huffs, but he doesn’t yet flick their safe-signal. After the initial dizzying tumble he’s caught himself, is sure again in his grip, like rappelling down a building. Daniel grins bright and knowing like a schoolboy on the verge of a most excellent prank before seemingly catching himself, ordering his features into firm disproval.

“Besides,” he rumbles. “Need to talk. Need you to listen.”

Hand on the corset, tugging at the lacings.

“ _Leslie_.”

“Aunfuaaunnnngh!”

He hates to blush, can always feel the flush of blooming blood burning just under his skin, like a brand. But he can’t help it, just like he can’t help but moan when Daniel reminds him that he’s under arrest, tries to cover up each by picking up his thrashing.

Daniel (Rorschach? It’s all running—), damn him, just slowly, calmly traces the seams of the corset and down the straining planes of his stomach, fingers digging pleasurably (painfully) into the muscled lines leading to his groin, touches stopping just short of the places where he aches for it most.

“Have been making advances on my territory. Attempting to expand operations, spread your filth.”

Daniel never sounds like this—wet cloth dragged across gravel. _Nite Owl_ never sounds like this, not even on their darkest patrols.

Daniel (no, Rorschach, definitely Rorschach, mouth thin but emotion given away by languidly curving patterns of his face) grins.

“Have been bad. Very, very bad.”

A firm, well-muscled knee pressed hard against his perineum, nudging upward just enough to graze his balls with a faint, rhythmic pulse. He rocks back against it as much as the restraints will allow, but it isn’t enough. His cock bobs in heated frustration.

“Inappropriate.”

The heel is too big. He could kick it off easily if he wanted to, but for some reason his thrashing, bucking rage never makes it to his foot. Instead it slides traitorously up and down the curve of Daniel’s bicep with the rhythmic whisper of silk on skin. On his next pass up Daniel ducks his head just far enough to lick the top of Rorschach’s ankle, tongue hot and wet through the thin fabric.

Rorschach jumps when teeth close briefly over the spot, but he finds some solace in the fact that Daniel’s laughter is as muffled and strained as the quiet choking sounds he’s managing around the ball gag. With a last, almost chaste kiss Daniel pulls away, and Rorschach _isn’t_ whining at the loss of contact, the wet and cooling patch left behind, the shining line of his leg in the moonlight, obscene next to the smooth, accusatory shifting of his face looking down at him, he’s—

“Hey, hey. Calm down.” Brief, welcome break in character. Firm hands pressing down and across his bared chest in a rough, pawing massage.

Rorschach realizes he’s on the verge of hyperventilating, turns his focus to regulating his breathing. Daniel’s slowly rocking body above him and the heat of his hands up and down his torso provide the correct tempo, up and down, in and out, until he’s calm enough to find the motions teasing.

He parts his legs, tilts his pelvis up in invitation as much as he can, but Daniel pulls back. Why—

“Not yours to have,” he chides, even as idle hands move back to tweak at his nipples, sending a shiver of goosebumps down his spine.

Rorschach is confused. If Daniel doesn’t want _that_ , then what’s the point of his whole charade?

So focused on the puzzle, on trying to ignore the growing-painful ache between his legs, he doesn’t notice Daniel undoing the gag’s straps until the rubber ball is being pulled, wet and obscenely red, from his mouth. His jaw aches, he lets out a startled moan at the sudden feeling of now-alien emptiness, but Daniel quickly replaces it with two fingers, then thee, four. He nips pointedly at the calloused pads—it’s in character, his, the Twilight Lady’s, he isn’t sure at this point—but sucks as hard and fast as he can between wet, desperate pants.

Only when his fingers glisten with the same slick sheen that graces the abandoned ball gag does Daniel pull back enough for him to lathe the proffered palm.

Finally, _finally_ , that calloused hand is closing tight around his cock. Doesn’t move, doesn’t pump, just holds him, tighter and tighter until his vision goes red then loose again, and repeat and—

 _How does Daniel know?_

until—

 _How does he know that this is how he used to—_

When Daniel does shift his grip it’s only to inch high enough to rub maddening wet circles around and around the head, occasionally pressing down into the slit with his thumb. There’s no ball gag to swallow his fevered ramblings now, but Rorschach’s pretty sure he’s not making any sense anyway, so maybe he’s safe, maybe—

He forgets the mask, forgets the nylon, forgets the sweat pooling low on his back and the way the corset is twisted around his middle and the strain and stretch of his muscles as his whole body arches into that unforgiving touch.

Rorschach’s face stares down at him, blots hungry. Talons spread and ready to strike.

“Mine,” Daniel growls, in a voice familiar but not his own. “All mine. Partners. No criminal, no vice queen temptress, could change, _will_ change--”

And it suddenly makes sense, because sometimes he can’t bear to trust Daniel, better to brace for eventual betrayal than be caught and flayed by it unawares, but Rorschach exists to expose painful truths, to whisper them down to the ignorant screaming masses, and he _gets_ it, he finally—

“ _Partners._ ”

His orgasm races over him with white, liquid fingers.

In the humming aftermath, feeling boneless and not quite connected with his body, any doubts that may have lingered are driven back by the distant sensation of Daniel peeling off the sticky garments and crooked cat’s-eye. Only after he’s bare and himself again does he hear the rhythmic, staccato whisper of flesh on flesh and the familiar, awkward gasping that always precedes Daniels’ own release.

Beyond Archie’s round eye the clouds break to expose a brief stretch of blushing sky and the sulking, waning sliver of the nearly-new moon, but both are quickly hidden again by a thick, cumulus curtain.

Dusk, with her soft swells of flesh and flaming red hair, is not welcome here, only swooping, shadowed creatures of the night.

*

Rorschach still isn’t particularly fond of the trophy case, but he doesn’t make any more comments about the Twilight Lady’s picture.

If that’s where she wants to be—locked away behind layers of glass and steel, untouched and alone in the cold of Daniel’s basement—then who is he to argue?

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to ook for her inspiring pchat editing (http://pics.livejournal.com/slipstreamborne/pic/0007bs3q), brancher for the fantastic beta, and all of pchat for the helpfully corruptive influence. :D


End file.
